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Gore Won't Rule Out 2016 Run

Challenger?

On Friday, Politico released an interview with former vice president Al Gore, who spoke with reporter Darren Samuelsohn “over black coffee at his sleek Nashville office’s conference table made from recycled wood salvaged from the bottom of the nearby Tennessee River.” That charming setting contrasted sharply with Gore’s doom-and-gloom predictions of global apocalypse thanks to climate change.

After suggesting that hurricanes were the result of global warming, Gore said that such impacts were just the beginning: “we’re talking about a different scale of impacts here. Crop failures in many of the most important growing regions. Hundreds of millions of climate refugees.”

Why aren’t Americans acting as Gore wants them to? Gore blames paralysis in our politics, stating, “our democracy has been hacked and we’re suffering from what some have called demosclerosis. Big money is now at toxic levels.”

Gore, of course, is big money – he is now worth more than $200 million, 50 times more than he was worth as vice president, after immersing himself in the green world, and infamously flies his private jet around the world in order to push against pollution. Gore terms billionaire political investor Tom Steyer “Mr. Tipping Point.”

Gore insisted that green energy was getting cheaper: “Now I don’t care what the carbon polluter lobby says or does, or what the anti-statist right-wing ideological groups do or say; there’s just a very big difference between cheaper than and more expensive than.”

Gore continued, “It’s not about me. And I’ve never tried to make it about me.” He then stated that the media was run by anti-green corporate interests:

You think of a family of an alcoholic father who flies into a rage every time the word alcohol is mentioned. Well, the rest of the family sometimes learns to never mention the gorilla in the middle of the room in order to avoid the rage. Well, that is what happens to some in the news media. … they get told by the conglomerate owners and managers hitting the bottom line: Our ratings go down if you make this percentage of people so angry that they switch the channel.

The notion that the networks, which have been heavily stumping for the Obama administration’s green agenda for years, are run by conglomerates adverse to the interest of Al Gore is astonishing.

Gore said that he does have President Obama’s direct line, but he doesn’t use it frequently. “I have no complaints about any lack of access,” Gore stated, going on to praise the presence of John Podesta, former Clinton staffer and Center for American Progress head, in the White House. He also said that he had Hillary Clinton’s ear on climate change: “I will say that during the 2008 campaign she called and spent a lot of time asking me about the issue. Asking for advice on what the most forward leaning positions she could take would be.”

Gore then refused to rule out a 2016 run:

You say you can ask the question a million ways. I’m going to only answer it one way. With apologies, I’m sure you’ve heard this answer before. I am a recovering politician. And the longer I avoid a relapse the more confidence that I will not succumb to the temptation to run yet again. But I’m a recovering politician. I’ll just leave it at that.

Gore said that he is now a vegan who drives a Prius and a Lexus hybrid.